Weapons teams will find only oil, says former Iraqi officer

Saddam Hussein's intelligence services in Iraq allegedly set up a network of clandestine cells and small laboratories after 1996 with the goal of rebuilding chemical and biological weapons.

A former senior Iraqi intelligence officer, who held the rank of brigadier-general, said each closely guarded weapons team had three or four scientists and other experts who were unknown to United Nations inspectors, and who conducted crude experiments in bunkers and back rooms in safe houses around Baghdad.

He insisted they did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exists in Iraq. But he said the teams met regularly and put plans on paper to quickly develop these if UN sanctions against Iraq were lifted.

"We could start again any time," the unnamed officer said. But he added nothing would be found, except oil.

He said UN sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were in effect eliminated in the mid-1990s.");document.write("

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He said the secret weapons groups were created in late 1996 and 1997 because the regime's unconventional arms programs had been dismantled or destroyed by then and that UN inspectors knew people who had worked in them.

The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction has sparked mounting criticism in Washington and London. In the latest development, US and British intelligence analysts are disputing claims that two trucks found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. Instead, they said, it was more likeIy the units were for other purposes and that the evaluation had been damaged by a rush to judgement.

"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers.

The Bush Administration has said the trucks are evidence that Saddam was hiding a biological warfare program.

But intelligence analysts in the Middle East, the US and Britain are expressing serious doubts about the evidence.

At least three teams of Western experts have examined the trailers, and while the first two groups were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended to make germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts disagreed strongly over the trucks' function.

Sceptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilisation, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production. They also said that the mobile plants had gas-related equipment that Iraqi scientists said was used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, a claim some analysts see as potentially credible.